Before Americans turned to Buddhism for life hacks, they....

Aik TC

15 May 18, 10:16

Before Americans turned to Buddhism for life hacks, they
treated it like a dangerous cult

Ryan Anningson March 15, 2018 Quartz

In January 1902, Reverend Clarence Edgar Rice warned
Americans of a religion that “both in theory and practice…degrades women,” practices
“crass brutality” towards animals, and “goes hand-in-hand with vice…that
blushes not at unspeakable practices.” Even more terrifying, this “cruel” and
“pessimistic” tradition was making inroads in the United States through both
immigration and the conversion of American citizens. Similarly, American
newspapers during the Progressive Era warned of “the religion of gloom and
melancholy,” being spread by debaucherous “priests of unutterable cruelty [who]
traffick in human flesh.”

What was this terrible creed, with its awful priests? It was
Buddhism—a tradition today often heralded in popular culture as the path to
everything from a better professional career to world peace.

Within a century, Buddhism in America has gone from being
frequently portrayed as a “dangerous cult” to becoming the prime spiritual
practice of the business elite. Americans now generally view Buddhism
favorably, according to Pew Research Center, while Canadians view Buddhism in
equal favorability with Christianity, according to an Angus Reid poll.
Mindfulness is taught in schools, and Buddhism is presented as a sort-of
spiritual science. How can our views of Buddhism have changed so much in so
little time?

The racist roots of
portraying Buddhism as “cruel” and “pessimistic”

The historical period in which Reverend Rice was warning
Americans about the evils of Buddhism is sometimes described as the “Yellow
Peril.”

American books and newspaper articles at the time warned of
the “clash of civilizations” developing between “uncivilized” Asian and
“civilized” White culture, suggesting Asians would eventually rise up to
overthrow The West. Politicians enacted exclusionary laws: In 1882, President
Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring all Chinese
immigrants; decades later the Johnson-Reed Act, Asian Exclusion Act, and
National Origins Act cut off Asian immigration, and limited all non-Northern
European immigrants to almost nil.

The “proof” that helped justify racist rhetoric and pass
eugenics-based domestic policy often involved race sciences like phrenology. In
the United States, many “top” scientists, like G. Stanley Hall, argued that
races could be scientifically hierarchized, with “greater” and “lesser” races.
This pseudo-science gave scientific credence to the fear of outsiders that
Americans felt, and suggested that Asians were biologically barbarous and
animalistic, while their religion lacked morality and created a sort-of
brainwashed horde.

All of this contributed to American characterizations of
Buddhism—which was associated with a disparaged and “scientifically” inferior
racial group—as a violent, scary religion.

How Buddhists used the
language of race sciences to adapt their pitch for Americans

When religious people, and therefore their religion, move to
a new area through immigration and missionary expansion, religions must adapt
and change for their new surroundings; this fact has been repeated for
millennia.

In the late 1800s, Buddhism was the subject of a cultural fad
in the United States, with magazine coverage, social groups, and travel
journals all discussing Buddhist religion, culture, and art. But the doctrines
of the religion failed to mesh with American religious culture, being portrayed
as a pessimistic tradition of annihilation. Buddhist leaders looked for ways to
adapt their presentation and create ways of explaining the religion that were
more amenable to American sensibilities. Part of this task was divesting the
notion of pessimism that had troubled the tradition in the past.

Beginning around the turn of the 20th Century, Buddhism
underwent a publishing revolution, creating hundreds of English-language
magazines, journals, and pamphlets to help spread Buddhism in the United States
and Canada.

In previous encounters between The West and the Buddhist world,
Western authors often criticized Buddhism as a religious tradition without a
god, or an agnostic worldview. In early-20th Century America, a religion
without a creator god was not socially acceptable. Therefore, Buddhist
publications beginning in the 1900s argued that Buddhism had a god, but that
God was simply understood differently than the Christian monotheistic God. In
fact, they argued that the Buddhist notion of god was beyond a singular being,
including both existence and non-existence, suggesting that the Buddhist “god”
was superior to Christian monotheism.

When Buddhism entered the United States, the most modern and
agreed upon “sciences” were race sciences, and Buddhist religious thinkers and
missionaries were quick to pick up on this point. They borrowed its language to
promote their religion. Similarly to how The West had presented a (quack)
scientific explanation for their superiority, Buddhist publications used the
language of race science to explain their spirituality. They even used the writings
of C.G. Jung, who famously wrote of the “Eastern Mind” versus the “Western
Mind” to argue for their own religious superiority; Jung said that Asians were
more inherently spiritual, while Westerners were logical, and Buddhists wrote
extensively about how they needed to teach spirituality to Americans, who had
lost it to crass materialism.

Buddhism was not presented as a religion of science, but as
science itself; even mindfulness meditation, once the purview of only the most
advanced monastic meditators, is presented in America as “beyond the Buddha,”
harkening to a pre-historic mental spirituality. The idea of Buddhist
spirituality resulting in “this-worldly” benefit is certainly nothing new, but
the mystification of Buddhist doctrines, combined with the promotion of
mindfulness meditation as being beyond the Buddhist religion and connected to
science, all combined in 20th Century America to help fuel the current
proliferation of mindfulness.

Even today, comparisons of Buddhism and science are commonplace,
with neuroscientists, psychologists, and physicists paying attention to
Buddhist doctrines and practices, such as mindfulness. Historically, Western
academics wrote about comparisons of Buddhism and science as far back as the
19th Century, while Buddhists themselves promoted their religion as scientific
even at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

During the Victorian Era (1837-1901), the Buddha was viewed
as an ethical reformer, comparable to Jesus, despite Western views on Asians
and Buddhism more broadly. In other words, just like today, for a religion to
be “scientific” was a major benefit in American religious culture, but between
1900 and 1940, science in America was heavily racialized and colored by a false
hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. Within the global network of
colonialism, Asians used their religion to promote their own superiority in the
face of being labelled inferior; they promoted Buddhism as superior to Western
culture and religion, and as the very basis for scientific development.

The rise of mindfulness

Throughout the 20th Century, especially following World War
II, religious ideas became more diffuse in American culture, creating what is
often called the “marketplace of religions.” Ironically, as American religious
leaders increasingly feared secularization, they became increasingly involved
in extra-church activities, successfully liberalizing American religious
culture but diminishing their own necessity.

Meanwhile, Buddhists promoted meditation practice across the
West. Perhaps the most famous singular voices in this discussion begin with the
Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) and layman S.N.Goenka (1924-2013). Ledi
Sayadaw saw the incoming colonialism of the British as a way to promote
meditation techniques to the laity, even though the practice was normally only
undertaken by advanced monastics. Sayadaw claimed that a nation of mindfulness
could overcome colonial powers. Following Sayadaw’s example, Burmese layman
S.N. Goenka has helped to fund over 310 meditation centres across 94 countries,
promoting a form of mindfulness for lay people that makes little to no mention
of the Buddhist religion.

Modern meditation teachers commonly present mindfulness as
being beyond even the Buddha himself, a spiritual-scientific technique beyond
any one historical period or religion. The mystification of Buddhism in many
ways becomes complete in modern mindfulness. Placing Buddhism within the
marketplace of American religion, de-coupled from its own doctrines and
practices, this process completes many of the foundational writings of
Buddhists published in the early 20th Century. This is not to suggest that
there are not benefits within modern mindfulness, but merely that it includes a
much longer and fraught history than many of today’s modern mindfulness
teachers recognize. Buddhism underwent a process of mysticization so it could
become all things to all people and was justified by scientific comparisons,
which is a process that continues in modern mindfulness today.

Buddhism did not find success in America due to a singular
figure or institution; in fact, with the success of mindfulness in American
culture, practice is sometimes removed from the religion itself and placed
directly into the marketplace. Buddhists themselves once promoted their
religion this way to counter the nationalism and xenophobia of America. They
used the language of race sciences to promote Buddhism as superior, and
mysticized the doctrines of the tradition to be applicable to American views,
resulting in the de-coupling of meditation practice and the religion itself.

Is mindfulness
appropriation?

Mindfulness, as dispersed in American culture today, is
sometimes regarded as a form of cultural appropriation, taking Buddhism outside
of its cultural and religious context.

In a certain way, this is very true; mindfulness for better
sex is an obvious example of the removal of context from a meditation tradition
associated with celibate religious monastics. At the same time, Asian Buddhists
actively promoted this presentation of mindfulness dating back nearly a
century, in order to prove that their own religious tradition was not the
inferior corruption, as suggested by academics, popular culture, and even
pseudo-science. Skillful means (upaya) is an important concept in Buddhism,
which means adjusting the teachings of Buddhism to suit the audience in a given
situation, but by doing so, the student would be lead to the ultimate Truth of
the religion. The idea of mysticizing doctrines and the reinterpretation of
practices is written directly into the religious tradition.

In other words, although Buddhists of the early 20th Century,
and even today, may not recognize, or even necessarily agree with, all of the
manifestations of modern mindfulness, and other Buddhist ideas, it is certainly
true that Asian Buddhists played an active role in this promotion. However, it
should be recognized that these developments took place in an area and time
that was heavily racialized, and actively antagonistic to Asians and Buddhism.

I believe that this type of historical study can help us to
find answers, or at least new perspectives, to issues that face us today.
Rather than facing the next perceived “incoming threat” with suspicion, and
even isolationism, and eventual internment, we can look to the history of
Buddhism in America to see how to include outside groups. Today, the suggestion
that Buddhism is a “dangerous cult” is largely laughable in the United States,
but a century ago, this was “common knowledge.” We can use our past experiences
to help us with today’s problems because we have been through this before.
Tracing Buddhism’s history from “cruel joke,” as a newspaper once called it, to
modern mindfulness can help us to see exactly that.